Exploring garment rental as a sustainable business model in the fashion industry: Does contamination impact the consumption experience?

Fashion has evolved into an unsustainable industry; fast fashion, which has a low‐cost, high‐volume focus is the dominant business strategy, resulting in vast resource use and environmental externalities. The purpose of this research is to support the transition to a more circular industry through exploring the opportunity for short‐term garment rental as a part of a product‐service shift. A number of consumer barriers exist to the adoption of novel business models. Included is the issue of contamination; literature suggests that an item may be considered contaminated when another person or object interacts with it. This poses a fundamental conflict to the garment rental proposition. This study furthers understanding of contamination through a qualitative content analysis of 566 online reviews of two existing fashion rental providers. This enables insight into the actual customer experience, revealing a range of contamination incidences—most commonly visual and odour‐related. The impact of a contamination event on the customer experience was overwhelmingly recorded as negative, at worst resulting in total rejection of the entire rental concept. The analysis suggests that contamination presents a psychological and practical obstacle to successful rental. A range of managerial implications were raised with corresponding recommendations offered to mitigate and reduce contamination across the value chain. The study highlights that trade‐offs exist between product quality and commercial profitability. Findings suggest that rental is likely to be a challenging business model, raising the need for further academic and practitioner research to augment the findings.     

The Face-Space Typicality Paradox: Understanding the Face-Space Metaphor

Some recent accounts of human face processing use the idea of 'face space', considered to be a multi-dimensional space whose dimensions correspond to ways in which faces can vary. Within this space, 'typicality' is sometimes taken to reflect the proximity of a face to its local neighbours. Intuitions about the distribution of faces within the space may suggest that the majority of faces will be 'typical' in these terms. However, when typicality measures are taken, researchers very rarely find that faces cluster at the 'typical' end of the scale. In this short note we attempt to resolve this paradox and point out that reasoning about high dimensional distributions requires that some specific assumptions are made explicit.     

Objective Scoring of the TAT: Further Validation

Attention was called to a highly objective, reliable and parsimonious. method for scoring the TAT and further empirical evidence of its validity was presented. The scores obtained through this method were found to be significantly related to two other TAT scoring methods and to ratings by independent interviewers of the level of maturity of 64 male and 61 female young adults. The results were related to research bearing on the relation between projective material and overt behavior.     

Elevated self‐esteem 12 months following a 10‐day developmental voyage

The following article examined elevated self‐esteem as a function of a 10‐day developmental voyage. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 demonstrated that participants who completed the voyage experienced elevated self‐esteem. Study 2 replicated and extended these results insofar as it revealed that (a) elevated self‐esteem was maintained 12 months following the voyage; and (b) increasing levels of perceived self‐efficacy and belonging (as assessed on the last day of the voyage), but not social support, each made a unique contribution to these effects. Together, these findings provide converging evidence to suggest that a 10‐day developmental voyage upon the Spirit of New Zealand promotes elevated self‐esteem that is maintained over time, and that perceived self‐efficacy and belonging contribute to this outcome.     

Phenomenology of Bibliotherapy in Modifying Teacher Punitiveness

The authors examined the phenomenology of bibliotherapy and its effects in changing preservice teachers' punitive attitudes toward children. Participants (N = 29) were enrolled in a university course (Introduction to Emotional Disturbance). Five books by Torey Hayden, autobiographical accounts of teaching and building relationships with students with emotional and behavioral disorders, were read and discussed within the framework of group bibliotherapy. Participants completed a self-report rating form measuring their tendency toward punitiveness during the first and last weeks of the 15-week semester. Participants also completed a questionnaire measuring the bibliotherapeutic impact of reading Hayden's texts, and they kept journals about the experience of reading Hayden. Comparison of the group's pre- and post-measures on punitiveness showed a small, albeit significant decrease in punitiveness; decreased punitiveness was associated with the therapeutic impact of reading Hayden. Phenomenological analysis of the participants'journal entries revealed that the structure of the experience of reading Hayden was one of identification with the protagonist, leading to emotional and cognitive learning.